The new Mac Studio is one of the fastest computers ever — but do you really need all that power?

The Mac Studio shook up Apple’s desktop lineup in a big way last year, offering true workstation-grade power within a tiny design that isn’t much bigger than the Mac Mini. It’s an excellent combination of form and function for creative professionals and prosumers who are short on space and big on budget, which is why Apple didn’t change it much for 2023 — aside from packing even faster processors inside.

Featuring your choice of Apple’s highest-end M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips, the new Mac Studio is, by most measures, the fastest computer we’ve gotten our hands on. It’s a great choice for pros who are long overdue for a new desktop and truly need the power, but is it actually worth a few thousand dollars? I spent several weeks using the new Studio as my main machine for working and creating — and got a deep dive from Apple’s Colleen Novielli and Shelly Goldberg — to answer that question for you.

What we liked about it

A compact, discreet design

The 2023 Mac Studio’s physical design is virtually unchanged from the model that debuted last year, and everything I said about it in my original Mac Studio review still holds true. This is an incredibly compact high-end computer, with a curvy 3.7-inch-tall design that isn’t much larger than the famously sleek Mac Mini. I love the way it sits unassumingly under my monitor and how easy it is to move once I need to change rooms or access the ports in the back.

“I think at first it took some time for people to wrap their heads around that. Like, ‘Is it actually possible that I’m getting that amount of performance in this form factor?’ Fast-forward a year later, users are just absolutely thrilled,” says Novielli, who works on the Mac product marketing team.?“And so we’re seeing it, really, in so many different places. You might have heard us say in the keynote that it’s in hundreds of thousands of home and pro studios around the world, and it’s really just been a game changer across many disciplines.”

Case in point: My brother — a professional music producer — recently got an M1 model for his home studio and couldn’t stop raving about how much cleaner it made his setup compared to the old Mac tower he was working with. He was also quick to note how much more quickly he was able to export his complex multi-track recordings. If you’re short on space but don’t want to sacrifice performance, this is the computer to get.

The latest Mac Studio also retains the same generous port selection as last year’s model, which is a refreshing change from the minimal connection options on most other Macs these days. Loaded with two USB-C ports and an SDXC card reader up front and four Thunderbolt 4 ports, an Ethernet jack, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port and a headphone jack in the back, the Studio made it easy for me to connect my monitor, webcam, microphone and audio interface with plenty of free ports to spare. This setup allows you to connect up to five displays on the M2 Max model and as many as eight — including three 8K displays — on the M2 Ultra version, which should give power users plenty of flexibility for rigging up the ultimate multi-monitor workstation.

Despite its seemingly unchanged appearance, Apple notes that it made a number of subtle improvements to things like cosmetics and airflow while using more recycled materials than before.

“[There’s] a lot of under-the-hood innovation to make the product better, to make it have less environmental impact,” says Goldberg, who is part of the product design team behind the new computer. “But in general, when you look at it from the outside, it’s going to look like the M1 Studio that we know and love.”

One of the fastest computers ever

Armed with Apple’s M1 Max and M1 Ultra processors that are designed for demanding creative work, last year’s Mac Studio pumped out the best performance we’ve ever seen on a Mac. This year’s model swaps in Apple’s new M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips, which — you guessed it — are even faster.

I’ve been using my M2 Max Studio as my primary music production machine and have been able to record and edit 16-track projects without a hint of latency or slowdown. Once I was ready to export my session into a WAV file I could listen to on the go, the whole process took a brisk 16 seconds. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the Studio never got sluggish under the weight of my daily multitasking habits, which include Outlook, Slack, Discord, Zoom and an ungodly amount of Chrome tabs all running at once. And that’s only scratching the surface of what this beastly machine is designed to do.

Apple says that the Mac Studio with M2 Max is up to 50% faster than last year’s model and up to four times faster than a fully loaded 27-inch iMac. Meanwhile, the M2 Ultra model promises 3D-rendering speeds that are three times faster than the previous M1 Ultra Studio and video processing that’s up to 50% faster than last year’s. In our own benchmarks, the Mac Studio got the highest scores we’ve seen from a desktop on almost every test, revealing some impressive gains over the previous model while topping the competition in some key areas.

On the Geekbench 5 multi-core test (which gauges general performance), the 2023 Mac Studio scored a 15,276 — the highest number we’ve ever gotten from any computer. To put that in perspective, the Studio performed 18% better than last year’s M1 Max model, 50% better than the M2-powered Mac Mini and a whopping 68% better than the Intel-powered iMac 27-inch from a few years back. Long story short: If you’re upgrading from an Intel-powered Mac — or even an Apple silicon-powered iMac or Mac Mini — you’ll be enjoying a serious speed boost. And for editors interested in the nitty-gritty, this year’s model brings an especially welcome change on the video-encoding front.

“In the first generation of Mac Studio with M1 Mac and M1 Ultra…people overall were just really thrilled with being able to fly through 8K footage and do their edits and playing multiple large projects on the timeline,” says Novielli. “But one thing that users did mention is, ‘Hey, when I moved to M1 Ultra, why isn’t my encoding experience faster? Because you have two media engines there, why wouldn’t that be faster than M1 Mac?’ And so we actually went ahead and made a change to the SOC media engine architecture…and so encoding of a single stream is even faster.”

The new Mac Studio is also perfectly capable of playing the latest Mac games at their best. On our Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark, the Studio ran through the visually demanding action game at blistering 111 frames per second (fps) at 1080p, and a still-very-playable 40 fps at 4K. (For context, we consider anything above 30 fps playable and 60 fps to be the ideal minimum.) The M2 Max model’s gaming performance is about 23% better than the M1 Max version and was bested only by the Dell XPS Desktop — which packs a dedicated Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics card.

It’s worth noting that throughout all this heavy multitasking, music production and gaming, the Mac Studio stayed whisper quiet and mostly cool; I only noticed a bit of heat after running our graphically intensive Tomb Raider test several times. According to Apple, this year’s model is even more silent than before.

“We took another look at the fan design and we figured out how to make it even quieter in light workloads in the M2 generation by optimizing the fan structure and the fan speeds,” says Goldberg. “So customers are going to get that massive performance upside of M2 and still be able to hear themselves think.”

What we didn’t like about it

It’s pricey

It probably goes without saying but premium performance comes at a premium price. The Mac Studio starts at $1,999 for the M2 Max model and at $3,999 for the M2 Ultra model, both of which can balloon to thousands more once you start making some upgrades.

For example, you can tack up to 192GB of RAM (which is overkill for all but the most hard-core of creators) on the M2 Ultra model for an extra $2,000 and outfit the machine with up to 8TB of storage for $2,400, resulting in a killer productivity powerhouse that sells for a whopping $8,799. And that price doesn’t include a monitor, mouse or keyboard.

Related: The best MacBook you can buy now

Granted, this computer is aimed at creative professionals and prosumers who understand the kind of investment they’re making. Apple name-dropped Lunar Animation (a client of Disney’s) and “Game of Thrones” composer Ramin Djawadi as some of the Studio’s key users — we’re not exactly talking about folks who are making fan films and amateur recordings in their garage. From a consumer perspective, it’s also hard to suss out who really needs the added power (and expense of the M2 Ultra) when the M2 Max already pumps out best-in-class speeds, but Apple did help clarify who each version is for.

“Up-and-coming professionals or people who are doing freelance work are going to see amazing performance from M2 Max,” says Novielli, who called out photographers and musicians as some of the professions that’ll benefit most from this model. “And then, of course, if you’re going to have a thousand tracks with a lot of EQ and processing, things like that, you may move to the Ultra if you want additional memory for really large projects.”

No user upgradability

You’ll want to think hard about which of the aforementioned specs matter most to you, because once you configure your Mac Studio, there’s no going back. Unlike the Mac Pro (or certain older Mac Minis), the Mac Studio isn’t designed to be user-upgradeable — meaning you can’t open it up and swap in newer parts over time. This shouldn’t be an issue for most folks, as even the base M2 Max unit will deliver an incredible amount of future-proofed power for years to come, but it’s worth keeping in mind as you decide on how much storage and memory you’ll want out of the gate.

Bottom line

The Mac Studio is an excellent compact desktop for folks who need as much power as possible for intensive creative work — think 3D rendering, 8K video editing, programming and music production — but don’t want a giant tower cluttering up their workspace. The base M2 Max model offers some of the fastest performance we’ve ever seen on a computer, and you can crank it even higher if you invest in the pricier M2 Ultra model. There’s no reason to upgrade if you already have a Mac Studio, but anyone coming from an old Mac (especially an Intel-powered one) will see a serious increase in speed.

That said, $2,000 or more is a lot for a computer, and prosumers and creatives have plenty of cheaper alternatives to choose from. The M2 Mac Mini offers excellent performance for everyday multitasking and editing for as low as $599, and you can upgrade to the $1,299 M2 Pro model for a nice middle ground that’ll get the job done for more visually intensive stuff.

On the flip side, if you do want to go all out and have the flexibility to upgrade your machine over time, the new Mac Pro is a better fit for you. It’s got the same M2 Ultra chip you can get in the Mac Studio, as well as seven PCIe expansion slots that let you outfit and upgrade the desktop with powerful cards for things like audio production and video editing.

“M2 Ultra already comes with amazing storage performance, but if you want additional performance, there are cards that will give you that for your workflow,” says Novielli. “There are also faster networking options. So many of these professionals have studios with tens, honestly, many of them hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cards, all the equipment that they connect to it. And so if you have a workflow that’s built around PCI, you’re going to go Mac Pro with PCI.”

But if you don’t have a need for that kind of expansion — or the room for a big tower on or under your desk — the Mac Studio is one of the best high-end computers you can buy. Assuming it’s in your budget, of course.